Why Destiny Is Done

Every month in Play Magazine, we take a hot topic and look at the arguments for and against. Destiny is the hot topic this time around with X-ONE’s Josh West arguing that Destiny was designed to be a time sink, rather than a great game. Come back next week for the counter argument from Play Editor Luke Albigés.

Destiny is to first-person shooters what Watch Dogs was to third-person action games. Great mechanics and good intentions which are ruined by idiotic ideas and rushed execution.

Do you remember when we used to sink hours, evenings and weekends into videogames because they were fun? Destiny has ensured that we forget those days and instead sacrifice all of our time to the Altar Of Unsatisfactory Grinding. All hail the almighty Cryptarch and his masochistic love of rendering our time wasted, bow down before Xur and his unearthly love of Strange Coins. Bungie is incapable of changing or fixing Destiny for the better, because it itself sacrificed its soul to Activision in an effort to go rogue from Microsoft.

Destiny still has a severe lack of content – that is just a straight-up fact. Even now, more than six months after launch, it’s abundantly clear that the game wasn’t finished – not by full retail release standards, at least. Bungie conjured and unleashed a bleak illusion with Destiny that other publishers will now try to replicate for years, and why wouldn’t they? Bungie has cleverly taken a handful of woefully pedestrian story and Strike missions, and successfully dragged them out over hundreds of hours of gameplay. All because you are locked into a slow-burn, badly designed leveling system and the promise that it’ll be worth it eventually.

But can you honestly say that you’re still enjoying the ceaseless repetition, the maddening upgrade system, the disastrously shallow set of missions and the horribly exclusive expansion? If you are, then you’re either a liar or a lunatic, because I’d wager my bank of Radiant Shards that you are just enjoying something you can play with your buddies. Here’s the kicker: even Fuse was fun with friends. All you’re doing now is contributing to prolonging the lifeline of a game that should have died a month after launch. But Destiny wasn’t designed to be a great game; it has been designed to force you into a cycle of sinking time into something that offers nothing in return. And to get you to willingly sink more cash into, under-developed DLC drops – sorry, expansion packs – releasing at an alarming rate, of course.

Bungie knows this. Hell, the studio – so confused by its own loot system and end game – had you re-level all of your Exotic items barely three months in: that isn’t iterative, it is exploitative. If World Of Warcraft had pulled that shit on its players, it wouldn’t have just celebrated its tenth anniversary. The Dark Below is so underdeveloped and rushed that players were able to decimate Crota, the game’s toughest enemy, by pulling out a bloody LAN cable. That isn’t a clever hack you’ve discovered, that’s some serious SOCOM II, 2003-era of online gaming oversight right there.

If you’re playing Destiny for the sake of it, stop. Want a great shared-world shooter? Play Defiance. Want an awesome MMO on your PS4? Play Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Want a killer FPS? Dig out Killzone Shadow Fall. If you’re looking for a game that blends all of those together appropriately, give Destiny three or four years. Because right now, the game is offering some seriously negative vibes, and that isn’t likely to change. It’s a game without a soul, devoid of interesting hooks or fun past the first run through its content. There used to be a time when we’d bemoan games that launched so broken and unfulfilling that players were forced to find ways to destroy the loot system and glitch the handful of bosses to death within seconds to keep them fun. Now, we celebrate them. I worry about what that says about the quality of games the industry as a whole is producing.

I lasted from Launch until December. Not put the disc in since. I see some friends still to do this day playing it but have no understanding of why.

MattS71

I gave Destiny 15 hours of my life; that was enough

jean-Alexandre thibault

Yeah … lost me just before its first expansion.

Marcus

AHAHA, no. Go do one

tplarkin7

I regret many purchases this gen, and I’m grateful that I avoided Destiny. I played the demo and was bored. The same with Titanfall. The biggest problem with these games is they were designed to be “safe investments” for EA and Activision. Safe = boring. Safe = masculine female characters. Safe = lets make it too serious. Safe = fugly people.

bigshynepo

“Destiny is to first-person shooters what Watch Dogs was to third-person action games”

Quote of the Day.

bigshynepo

I made a lot of great friends through Destiny but can’t bring myself to go back to it despite my pre-purchased HoW expansion ready to drop. Destiny has officially ruined ‘buying expansions at launch’ for me.

Dylan Harris

Nice clickbait.

IToldYouSoAlready

Ouch, and even more ouch! This article is a major burn for Destiny, but it perfectly articulates my sentiments . Many of my friends are addicted to Destiny and it’s “Just-one-more-game-of-Crucible-and-I-can-fully-max-out-this-amazing-gun-that-i-will-never-use-again” gameplay. I think the basic structure was designed by a team of psychologists and behavioralists whose goal was to keep needy and insecure people playing for as long as possible. This game offers you little titbits along the way, with the promise and potential of a big pay-off if you put in mindless hours of grinding, foraging, bounty hunting, repetitive Strike games and so-so Crucible matches, a big pay-off that never really materialises.

Some of my friends love it and have put in 800-plus hours and others absolutely detest it, they want nothing to do with it at all. It has been very divisive in my group and a lot of communal gaming activities that we have played weekly for over ten years together has be obliterated by Destiny, the cohesion of our once-strong group was decimated by destiny and its Love it/Hate it strategy .

I don’t like it, but play it so I can still meet up with my friends, but it’s very thin now. Just how many times do they have to defeat fcuk1ng Omnigul before they become bored. It’s the same few raids, limited Crucible levels and Srikes. How many bloody Spirit Blooms or Relic Iron do I have to mindlessly farm just so I can level up another weapon that will probably just end up in the vault. So, I’m playing this game because I still want to meet my friends online. We have had big arguments over how much we are playing this game. I play other games such as Halo MCC and COD AW. I have one friends who is totally fixated on Destiny and completely refuses to play any other game. I can see the way this game manipulates his slightly needy personality and offering him just one more upgrade tomorrow if he just plays five more Crucible matches and hands in his completed bounty, the same one he has already completed Ad Nauseam. I totally despise this manipulation and it makes me feel even worse that my friends don’t see through this, no matter how much I explain it to them, no matter how many articles I show them about this.
I don’t find playing Destiny to be exciting. I do like the Raids on hard, but even they have become very repetitive. And, of course, my friends are now running around preparing themselves for HoW, running around getting everything ready to upgrade as soon as it’s release, even though they have already fully maxxed them twice already.
I played COD AW Zombies last night for the first time. My friends all have it, but still wanted to play Destiny, (“I just need 23 more strange coins for each of my three characters for when HoW drops” was the excuse). Zombies was brilliant, beautiful and it scared the sh1t out of me! The graphics are fantastic, the game play is unreal. But I had to play it by myself. Ok, I know, I could have played it online, but I just wanted to start off slow, or so I thought, Jeez, I thought my heart was going to jump out of my chest, it was so exciting. Something I definitely cannot say about Destiny, where the feeling of Deja Vu and here-we-go-again is overwhelming. I can play destiny to relax me and calm me down before I go to bed, something I should NEVER EVER say about a game! Where is the excitement? It is like playing a game Campaign, you’re playing against AI and the first time it’s good, but you might never do it again, only in Destiny, you have to play it again,….. and again….. and again.
Maybe I’m just a little needy too. or masochistic.

Jonathan Koldys

This article is click bait garbage. The author has clearly played the game all the way until the end. I know this because , you can’t acquire radiant shards unless you’re a very high level end game player.All of his complaints have already been addressed by Bungie.This is not the same game that launched last year. There is a monthly patch to fix any issues players have. The new DLC The House of Wolves is not Underdeveloped. It actually looks amazing! It’s actually adding a lot of replayability and story content to the main game. Some people just can’t take the grind and that’s fine, ….. but don’t portray it like its a bad game…Honestly you, you sound like you don’t know what the f*** you’re talking about.

Tony Lee

“Want a great shared-world shooter? Play Defiance.”

I almost fell out of my chair laughing so hard after reading this!

Anthony Brinklow

The influence of mobile in the console space, sadly.

Courier7

Destiny is far from dead….. HoW did great things to give the loyal fanbase what they wanted. If you have not played since the Drop of HoW I suggest giving it another go. The game is evolving and will continue to do so.

Peter

The main issue with Destiny is the random nature of rewards. Ive played since its launch and only recently stopped because the Witcher 3 is amazing. Since starting ive managed to get a couple of friends to play too. Both of which have about half the number of hours i do on the game. They also finish below me 99% of the time in terms of stats, as i tend to outkill them and not die. Ive helped these friends through some of the tougher sections of the game and my reward was non existent whilst they where both randomly assigned two of the best weapons in the game (which ive wanted from the start). There is no way to work towards goals,you simply have to hope for a item to randomly be assigned to you. Having played so many games whereby your skill is rewarded proportionally i must admit Destiny has got this BADLY wrong. Ill not be playing it again until the DLC is released. It does lack content and too many parts of the game have mechanics which encourage you to simply perform the same tactic repeatedly. When the Weekly nightfall comes around you can almost complete them from memory alone as you end up using the same exact tactics and camping spots on repeat.